1. Field
The present disclosure is directed to a method and apparatus for system selection. More particularly, the present disclosure is directed to system selection based on the availability of advanced services at a location.
2. Description of Related Art
Presently, an increasing variety of specialized services are being made available on cellular networks. These services are often not available on networks of all operators and are not available within all parts of a given operators network. For example, a mobile station, such as a code division multiple access end-user device, that frequently accesses a particular advanced service that is not ubiquitous can often find itself in a system where the service is not available. That is, the mobile station will acquire the system and go into an idle state. It will then obtain information on the paging channel about available advanced services on that system. Unfortunately, if the service the mobile station is seeking is not available on that system, the mobile station must perform system reselection. System reselection is a tedious process and during this process the mobile station is unable to receive any incoming calls. Thus, the mobile station can end up spending too much time scanning for and acquiring systems that do not provide the service the mobile station is looking for because information about the available services and/or features does not become available to the mobile station until it receives the paging channel overhead messages. Because the mobile station spends a significant amount of time acquiring service, this can result in missed pages, unsuccessful origination, and a generally unfavorable user experience. Also, the reselection and redirection of mobile station to alternate systems lead to increased registrations and this, coupled with registrations for the advanced services, such as broadcast/multicast registration or push-to-talk registration, can degrade cell capacity.
Thus, there is a need for an improved method for system selection that quickly determines the availability of advanced services.